Chapter 6

The Philanthropy of Masters

Can we bring together these seemingly disparate threads of a counter-history of the discipline of international relations in the United States?¹ The new field of scientific study was concerned not with the consequences of the anarchical structure of world order, as it is understood today, but with the dynamics of domination and dependency among the world’s superior and inferior races. The first self-identified “realists” sought the preservation of exclusivist national and Anglo-Saxon prerogatives in exploiting the raw materials, labor, and material wants of the dependent races. And the first black scholars (and only them) in a deeply segregated academy challenged the fundamental premise of international/interracial hierarchy, that different norms applied to different classes of people. Luckily, the main actors tie these strands together for us.

Rebranding the Anglosphere

Raymond Leslie Buell wrote to Edward Mead Earle on April 15, 1941, about Earle’s upcoming conference on Atlantic relations. After his appointment to the new Institute of Advanced Study in 1934, Earle, the onetime student of imperialism in the Near East, reinvented himself as a student of military affairs, a budding grand strategist, and a self-revising historian.² The Carnegie Corporation had finally agreed to fund his new seminar at the institute on military strategy and a trip to study the new Caribbean bases the United States had obtained from Great Britain in return for the transfer of fifty destroyers to the Royal Navy.³ The Social Science Research Council had courted him, beginning with an invitation to a November 1940 conference that was ostensibly devoted to “research of practical utility” on relations among the nations of the western hemisphere. But the real agenda was to counter the “totalitarian states’ versions of the Monroe Doctrine” and demonstrate how far the U.S. experience in Latin America diverged from the “ruthless imperialist policies of the Axis powers.”⁴ The Rockefeller Foundation paid to move the Coordinating Committee on International Studies, which was linked to the United Nations, to Princeton with Earle as research director. The council then voted to designate it the Social Science Research Council’s new International Relations Committee. The International Relations Committee’s main activity prior to its dissolution was to plan a conference at Prout’s Neck, Maine, in August 1941 to discuss the political, economic, and strategic future of the Atlantic area.

Buell wanted to know if Earle had followed up his suggestion “sometime ago” to include “some of the Negro intellectuals,” meaning the Howard school theorists, “on any studies connected with international relations.” Buell already knew the answer because he met his old friend Rayford Logan for dinner—at Union Station, the only place in Washington where Logan could dine with a white colleague in public. Logan had asked for Buell’s help in integrating him and his colleagues in postwar planning efforts. Buell told Earle that Logan, Bunche, and other international relations scholars at Howard deserved invitations: “Confidentially, they feel somewhat offended that they have been overlooked.” It was also important to consider the wider political stakes, since in some northern states blacks held the “balance of power” and support for the allies needed some shoring up in this quarter. He quoted from the recent press release by the Alpha Phi Alpha fraternity, the oldest national black intercollegiate association: “however sympathetic whites may be, they cannot know the yearnings in our hearts.”⁵

Earle wrote back immediately to reassure Buell: “You are of course quite right that it is outrageous to omit Negro scholars from discussions on the foreign policy of the U.S.” Unfortunately, Earle and his colleagues had just held the planning meeting the day before. “Had your letter come a week ago we could have invited one of them.” Nonetheless, he and William “Bill” Lockwood, the Institute of Pacific Relations official on leave for two years to help Earle run the Institute of Advanced Study/Social Science Research Council committee, would see that steps were taken thereafter “to include them or others of their race in our discussions.” He closed on a slightly defensive note. “I am sure you know that neither Lockwood nor I has [sic] any prejudice whatsoever against Negroes. Overlooking them is a sin of omission which I am afraid we all commit far too often.”⁶ Lockwood appears from the record to have behaved honorably. But much of what Earle wrote was a lie.

Chicago’s Quincy Wright, a recent addition to the Social Science Research Council International Relations Committee, had proposed the conference on the future of the Atlantic area as a possible step toward founding an institute of Atlantic relations. Discussions between him and Edward Carter, secretary-general of the Institute of Pacific Relations, another member, had started even before the committee voted formally to approve it in February 1941. Carter headed the three-man organizing committee.⁷ Drawing on the Institute of Pacific Relations model once more, Wright imagined representatives taking part from Scandinavia, the British Commonwealth, the Low Countries, the Iberian states, South America, the United States, France, South Africa, and the Caribbean. One of the topics he wanted covered was “the problem of colonies and backward areas, international controls, [and] mandates.”⁸

It was Carter, the chair, who first posed to Earle the possibility of “inviting some South African negro or American negro, or British or American scholar who has recently been in South Africa and is in touch with negro thought as to South Africa’s external relations.” He was pointed. “It would seem to me that it is of the utmost importance that the point of view of the Africans themselves should be expressed, and that we should refuse simply to rely on a summary of their opinions as reported by their white masters.”⁹ Carter was basically adopting the convention of the Institute of Pacific Relations regarding conferences. Quincy Wright seconded the proposal. “I think your notion of getting a Negro from West Africa is also good; perhaps someone from Liberia might be invited as well as from one of the British or French colonies.”¹⁰ And the committee’s secretary, Bill Lockwood, staked out a fallback position.

However opponents quashed the idea of inviting Bunche or any other black man from the United States, Africa, or the Caribbean before Buell contacted Earle. Lockwood later wrote discretely about objections that had been raised, complaining it was absurd “to leave out of account the group which almost more than any other has a stake in the present international problem with its racial implications.”¹²

Historian and Chatham House insider John Wheeler-Bennett, whose contacts Earle was counting on for assuring a strong British and Commonwealth delegation, killed talk of “inviting negroes” and having them discuss colonial issues. First, he lobbied to narrow the focus of discussion to the “North Atlantic,” an idea Carter seconded and one that clearly was attractive to the rest of the group, which quickly began to think in terms of an “Anglo-American sea power bloc” as principal guarantor of the postwar regional order and the nucleus of a new international organization.¹³ Wheeler-Bennett questioned the rationale for and the cost of inviting “representatives of the coloured races.” South Africans were highly unlikely to attend, in this case, and it “would certainly affect our own people.” If it was as vital as others thought, might a Liberian suffice?¹⁴ Earle’s promise to Buell to include the Howard group “or others of their race” thereafter was forgotten.

I can’t say what factors—distaste or fear of sitting in a room with a black man, an unwillingness to wrestle with the country’s most articulate critics of colonialism and racism at a key juncture, an exaggerated sense of the importance of their own project—drove this particular decision. We know however that when Earle returned from his month-long tour of sites for new military bases in Jamaica, Trinidad, St. Thomas, St. Lucia, and Antigua, he underscored the threat to the color line there, in particular the need to send “American young women of fine character to supply an indispensable and altogether legitimate need” in those places where there were too few “white girls” (who were monopolized by the officers). “American soldiers are more than ordinarily dependent upon feminine society. Dancing is, for example, an almost indispensable form of recreation and cannot be provided in any of the West Indian Islands or in the Canal Zone under existing conditions”; that is, because the women in those places were black.¹⁵ Rayford Logan, who gave frequent talks on decolonization and the prospects for black people in the postwar world, found that white audiences—from the American Friends Service Committee, with which he worked closely, to groups on college campuses—still obsessed with and distracted by the issue of miscegenation.¹⁶

Logan erroneously thought that Buell’s backing would make all the difference. “At last it looks as if I am going to make contact with some of the white scholars who are working on the New World Society,” he wrote in his diary.¹⁷ His commitment to integrating postwar planning efforts followed naturally from his long held belief that the coming (and then reality of) war could serve the cause of black freedom worldwide. Padmore and others had made the same argument, as Bunche had noted in his journal in 1938, and now he and Abe Harris had joined the black auxiliary of an originally segregated pro-intervention lobby.¹⁸ Logan had already successfully campaigned to press the War Department and other federal agencies to expand opportunities for blacks in the military and the defense industry (they had an “equal right with white men to be shot in the field of battle” is how William “Bill” Riis, a roving editor for The Reader’s Digest and Logan’s friend put it when he lobbied the White House on his behalf).¹⁹

However, international relations professors and their backers resisted the idea of integrating their inner circles. No African American scholar was invited to join any of the private postwar planning projects at Carnegie, the Council on Foreign Relations, and Princeton. African American intellectuals and organizations, including the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, would have to pursue the vital questions of the prospect of freedom and the representation of dependent peoples in the future peace conference largely on their own.²⁰

“The Atlantic Charter: It Means Dark Races Too”²¹

The one integrated initiative of the early war years, the Committee on Africa, the War, and Peace Aims, involved whites who had long been associated with the interracial cooperation movement, not least its leader, the philanthropist Anson Phelps Stokes.²² Ralph Bunche was one of the principal authors of its report, The Atlantic Charter and Africa from an American Standpoint (1942), an early contribution to the debates launched over whether the Atlantic Charter issued jointly by President Franklin Roosevelt and Prime Minister Winston Churchill in August 1941 applied to the colonial territories and, if so, how to translate its vague terms into concrete policies.²³ Many Black Americans were suspicious, having learned first through George Padmore’s reporting that Churchill had assured his own people that the charter’s third point concerning the right “of all peoples to choose the form of government under which they will live” and to see “sovereign rights and self-government restored to those who have been forcibly deprived of them” in no way applied to “Colored Races.” Presumably the fourth point, which promised “equal access to raw materials of the world,” did.²⁴

For the Howard school critics of the report, the problem began with the vision that animated it, namely South African prime minister Jan Smuts’s updated thinking about “trusteeship”—a putative middle road between equality and naked exploitation that South Africa was charting for the future.²⁵ For Smuts, the old mandate system may have outlived its usefulness, and the “advanced” states, or “guardians,” to use the terms that the committee recommended in place of old and outdated notions of superior and inferior races, would guide the “retarded” ones. To what end? Equality was off the table, apparently. When South Africa’s African National Congress demanded full citizenship rights and the dismantling of color bars in accordance with the Atlantic Charter’s provisions, Smuts refused to meet with Congress representatives based on such an obviously mistaken understanding of trusteeship.²⁶

The Committee on Africa, the War, and Peace Aims outlined four stages, “at least in the colonies with the most advanced native populations,” toward effective capacity for self-government or “a steadily increasing share in the determining of government policy” or “autonomy.” They didn’t offer a timeline but in a footnote referred to a broadly similar plan by W. Bryant Mumford, head of the Colonial Department at the University of London, that envisioned 20-, 40-, and 60-year milestones on the way to dominion status. As an independent state, South Africa was free “to work out its own problem of race adjustment,” but the report repeatedly emphasized the signs of positive change there and in the other settler colonies. Apparently, identification with the wartime South African government, a key ally in the struggle against fascism, led to an interpretation similar to the interpretations of those who imagined the Soviet Union evolving “toward something resembling our own and Great Britain’s democracy.”²⁷

Rayford Logan, for one, wasn’t fooled. He described the real principles of Jan Smuts’s trusteeship policy as “white supremacy, segregation and the continued effective disfranchisement of the native peoples,” and he warned of the return of the worst aspects of the old League of Nations mandate system in updated garb.²⁸ He was also privately critical of Bunche’s diffidence.²⁹ Two recently hired Howard professors, however, pressed the critique of The Atlantic Charter and Africa much further. The sarcasm drips from the page of Eric Williams’s review in the Journal of Negro Education. The committee offered no new rational ground for believing the pieties of British administrators and South African generals about trusteeship. At a moment when “radical changes must be made in the condition of the colonial peoples, the report will seem to those most concerned, the African people, just another in a by now very lengthy list of mild palliatives for a deadly disease.”³⁰ And Merze Tate had just accepted a one-year position in history at Howard, teaching in part for Logan, when she published “The War Aims of World War I and II and Their Relation to the Darker Peoples of the World.” The article rehearsed part of the argument of the book that she hoped to write next, tentatively titled “The White Man’s Blunders,” which would examine the impact of imperialism on the white race.³¹ In her reading of the committee’s report, the “white man is a century behind the colored man in his thinking on civilization. Long years of imperialism have very nearly deprived him of vision. He still reasons in terms of colonies, colonial development, economic exploitation of “backward regions,” and even the most liberal cannot divorce from their minds the idea of “trusteeship” and “international mandate.”³²

Logan, however, thought it absolutely vital to distinguish the idea of “trusteeship,” which, however one disguised it, still reflected racist assumptions that undergirded modern imperialism from his preferred vision of a reformed, universally applicable, and internationalized mandate system that represented the best way to secure the rights of colonized people. That is, he rejected the idea that any African colony or protectorate could govern itself, and argued as much on a panel at Howard in early 1943 with the Gold Coast’s Frances (later Kwame) Nkrumah, then a graduate student assisting in the army-funded African Institute at the University of Pennsylvania. Nkrumah had “made a fervent plea for the immediate independence of Africa.”³³ Logan’s rejection stemmed in part from reasons he had specified, however circumspectly, in The Atlantic Charter and Africa. He felt that the colonial regimes had not prepared the ground for their own dissolution. Africans thus would need a period of “apprenticeship” during which they would assume increasing responsibility for governance, and since the British, French, Portuguese, South Africans, and whoever might be coveting the former Italian possessions could not be trusted, a reformed and upgraded mandate administration was needed whose authority would supplant that of the colonial powers. As he envisioned his proposed structure, it would consist of trained officials, including Africans and other people of color, and would be headquartered not in Geneva or elsewhere in Europe but in an African city. It would have the authority to hear all petitions from aggrieved subjects.³⁴

Logan thought that an internationalized mandate regime was also the best that could be hoped for in light of the power positions of the United States and the other twenty-six signatories to the Atlantic Charter—the “United Nations”—that mattered. Logan’s is one of the few explicit assessments I know of this type at this time of the political obstacles to transforming the existing conditions of dependency. The Americans would not support decolonization if it meant opening up Africa to Soviet influence, he insisted, and Great Britain certainly did not intend to give up its colonies. (He was right.) The nascent nationalist movements did not have the ability to dislodge European administrators let alone settlers. (He got this one wrong, at least in part.) And any new state would need European capital investment.³⁵ Logan could speak with some authority about prospects, since he had worked behind the scenes in 1942–1943 with an American Friends Service Committee contact, Benjamin Gerig, a state department official and Ralph Bunche’s future boss, on the international mandate idea.³⁶ He knew even then that the odds were against such a structure, a reading that later scholarship with access to confidential records shows to have been the case.³⁷ British officials invested in new mechanisms for maintaining “acquiescence to our rule,” including the decision to emphasize “development” as a means of heading off possible American criticisms and, more crucially, meaningful political change.

The future of the colonized areas was entirely ignored at the Dumbarton Oaks discussions that began in August 1944, which prepared the ground for the drawing up of the UN Charter in San Francisco in 1945. Logan also watched the founders of the UN close down debate on the Atlantic Charter’s promise of self-determination and seal the fate of colonized people. He became a biting and bitter critic of the betrayal of African aspirations.

However, Logan also became a much more iconoclastic thinker (and gadfly) in the late war and early postwar years as he rethought the basis for his identification with the rapidly evolving African nationalist and pan-Africanist movements. For instance, he had advised the leadership of the NAACP, which had agreed to back Du Bois’s proposal to reconvene the Pan-African Congress in Paris in 1945, to instead widen its scope and make it a “Dependent Peoples[’] Congress.” Bunche, not surprisingly, given both his long-standing antipathy to racialism and his role in building the State Department’s new Division of Dependent Area Affairs, argued the same. It didn’t matter. George Padmore, Kwame Nkrumah, Joe Appiah (the father of Princeton philosopher Kwame Anthony Appiah), and their comrades had determined to hold a Fifth Pan-African Congress in Manchester, effectively sidelining the Americans, although Du Bois would be welcomed as a “father” of the movement.³⁸ In his talks Logan had also begun to warn against the danger in the transition to self-government of turning power over to an equally authoritarian faction (“a small group of nationals”), and he began to map the contours of what he called “inter-minority oppression,” (what we now call “interethnic conflict” or “intrastate violence”), for example, Serbians exploitation of Croats or Indian prejudice against native Africans in Kenya. The list was long.³⁹ Thus, he began to find common ground with Bunche when he dismissed the idea of immediate independence for Africa as “nonsense.”⁴⁰

Padmore, Bunche’s former student, didn’t think it nonsense. He was at least as smart as Bunche and Logan, and he later helped engineer what he called the transfer of power in Ghana, so it is worth briefly considering his The White Man’s Duty: An Analysis of the Colonial Question in Light of the Atlantic Charter, which he wrote with the disowned shipping heiress Nancy Cunard and which appeared soon after The Atlantic Charter and Africa. The White Man’s Duty made three key points.⁴¹ The first was that the empire should be replaced by a federation “evolving toward a socialist commonwealth” on the basis of “economic, political, and social equality in all colonies, protectorates and mandated territories.” Cunard’s introduction reminded readers that the Dutch government had apparently moved in precisely this direction the previous December, when it committed to constitutional reform in support of racial equality and future dominion status for the East and West Indies; Padmore referred to this as “a partnership of peoples, each autonomous in internal affairs.” (The promise was forgotten after the war.) The second point was that institutional capacity was such that in many places, for example the West Indies, Ceylon, and Mauritius, full or what he called “responsible” self-government could be instituted at once, before the war’s end, with elected parliaments, the end of the colonial governor’s veto power, and so forth. Conditions in parts of West Africa too would allow the building of similar institutions in place of “indirect rule” by the chiefs, since “routine work of administration and the running of daily life are [sic] already done by native Africans.”⁴²

Padmore’s third point posed the biggest challenge to all the trusteeship, guardianship, and apprenticeship models of stages toward self-government, of which the American Committee’s Atlantic Charter and Africa was one example. Regardless of the status of the already existing administrative apparatus or level of educational attainment or communication infrastructure in place in Nigeria or the Gold Coast or in what he called the less-advanced protectorates, where demands for self-government had not yet been made, the best way to “learn the art of government is by practicing it.” This is why, he argued, elections for representative councils ought to begin immediately rather than in some (often never-arriving) better tomorrow.⁴³

Anson Phelps Stokes reconvened key members of the American Committee along with others, including Melville Herskovits, Edward Carter (secretary-general of the Institute for Pacific Relations in New York), Max Yergan (head of the Council on African Affairs), and Kwame Nkrumah—the latter two at Bunche’s instigation—for a meeting at the Brookings Institution in March 1943.⁴⁴ Famously, another of the scholars Herskovits routinely denigrated, Carter Woodson, the founder of the Journal of Negro History, with whom he fought for control of black studies, turned the invitation down on the ground that he never joined “the oppressor to strengthen his control of the oppressed.”⁴⁵ They had assembled to plan a follow-up conference on Africa modeled on the recently concluded Mont-Tremblant conference of the Institute of Pacific Relations, and thus discussions naturally segued into the prospects for developing a parallel African institute. A second meeting led to election of Herskovits as acting chair, Du Bois as vice-chair, and Bunche as secretary, but no conference ever took place and the Phelps-Stokes Foundation eventually closed out the account.⁴⁶ This was the last time the Institute of Pacific Relations model would be held up as the way to organize an international relations research program. It was long forgotten by the time Diaspora studies unknowingly resurrected the model as Atlantic, Caribbean, Indian Oceans (or Worlds) in the 1980s and 1990s. Funding for Africa area studies lagged in the 1940s-1950s behind Soviet, Asia, and Middle East studies. However, the “world area” study model took over the imaginations of the Cold War–era foundations and their dependencies in the U.S. academy.

Ralph Bunche’s Odyssey

By 1940, the outspoken radical who for a short time exhorted the Communist Party to bring about the emancipation of the Negro People and wrote A World View of Race, had become a more circumspect public intellectual than Logan, the maverick who continued to speak out about racism and colonialism and work with progressive civil society organizations. He had also begun a journey from professor to policymaker. In September 1941, he went on leave from Howard to join the fledgling Office of the Coordinator of Information (after 1942 the Office of Strategic Services) as the British Empire Section’s Africa expert under Conyers Read, an English professor at the University of Pennsylvania. Soon after that, he warned Logan that the FBI had Logan, Locke, and other Howard faculty under investigation.⁴⁷

Bunche was one of four Office of Strategic Services officials to attend the Institute of Pacific Relations’ December 1942 Mont-Tremblant conference. It was his first international meeting, the high-water mark of the cooperation of the Institute of Pacific Relations with the U.S. state, and the first portent of the coming conflict at San Francisco in 1945 and after over white supremacy and decolonization. With Gandhi and Nehru imprisoned for their role in the “Quit India” demonstrations—where they would remain for the next two years—and the Indians who attended, who were also participating at the Institute of Pacific Relations for the first time, demanded the end of colonial rule. Bunche and other Americans pressed for reforms that would lead to meaningful self-government, and British officials attacked America’s double standards in the form of Jim Crow in the South and Japanese internment camps in the West.⁴⁸ Bunche returned from Quebec wanting to work on planning instead of writing handbooks for the North Africa invasion. He had notified his superiors in March of his plan to leave Office of Strategic Services “within the next month or so.” He had accepted a staff position with the new Ethnogeographic Board, an organization founded jointly by the Social Science Research Council, the American Council on Learned Societies, the National Research Council, and the Smithsonian Institution as an information clearinghouse on the non-European theater of the war.⁴⁹ Nonetheless, he then began to negotiate with Carter, the head of the Institute of Pacific Relations, about a position at the Institute. It is good that he did so, because the Ethnogeographic Board would soon be defunded.⁵⁰ The institute proposed that he move to New York and lead a multiyear study on the future of colonialism in the Far East. Staff there had begun searching for housing for Bunche and his family, and the head of the Julius Rosenwald fund, Edwin Embree, who had agreed to award a fellowship to Bunche to fund the project, pushed him to take it. “I do think that you have a contribution to make in a definitive report on colonization in the Far East and for the sake of your own career, I should like to see such a scholarly publication behind you.”⁵¹ The Institute of Pacific Relations was still expecting him in December 1943, when the announcement came that Bunche would join the State Department at the beginning of 1944.

What happened? Bunche’s biographers disagree about details and none has known about or chose to report about Bunche’s plans to join the Institute of Pacific Relations.⁵² Salary concerns probably played a role. Bunche had just bought a house in Washington, D.C., and his son was born in September 1943. Bunche also fretted: “Could I be accused of running out on the war effort in order to find a soft spot for myself?”⁵³ Years later, he gave part of the answer in the form of a homily, “What America Means to Me,” for the American Magazine (February 1950), which was reprinted in the Negro Digest (September 1950) after he won the Nobel Prize. Opponents had blocked his appointment—the State Department was famously one of the last federal departments and agencies to appoint African Americans to high-level positions—until Secretary of State Cordell Hull came to the rescue. The Tennessee native insisted that “a man’s color made no difference.”⁵⁴ Although he remained on the Howard faculty until 1950, Bunche had given his last lectures in the 1940–1941 school year and his career as scholar and theorist was over.

The scholars and theorists of world hierarchy had their work cut out for them. While still in his early days at the Office of Strategic Services, in February 1942, Bunche told his Howard colleague Logan what Colonel Donovan’s men were saying about the shape of things to come: “After the war there simply cannot be any of the namby-pamby 19th century liberalism. The United States, in brief, is going to police the world.” A few days later Buell basically told Logan the same thing. “Raymond told me that he had just written a one-hundred page memorandum discussing whether the United States would do the job alone or in cooperation with Great Britain. He pointed to the control…already established over Ethiopia. All backward countries, whether Poland or Latin American nations, must expect this kind of control, provided the United Nations wins the war.”⁵⁵ Buell’s successor in colonial administration at Harvard, Rupert Emerson, who had been seconded to Washington to manage the transformation of the Bureau of Insular Affairs into the Division of Territories and Island Possessions (or what the Harvard Crimson called America’s “colonies”), was pessimistic about the chances for blacks anywhere after the war.⁵⁶

Nor would what Henry Luce, Buell’s visionary boss, imagined have surprised Logan. “Africa is to be treated as a great corporate treasure-house and play-ground, trusteed for the benefit of all mankind (Egypt, South Africa and possibly one or two other parts will be excluded from the Trusteeship). The inhabitants of Africa will be the first charges on the common wealth of Africa. Their health and happiness will be of first concern, but there will be no hurry in working out ideas for self-government.”⁵⁷ Luce got it only a little wrong.

The Invention of a Tradition

The Rockefeller Foundation’s two years of support for the Coordinating Committee on International Studies (the Social Science Research Council’s de facto International Relations Committee) ended in December 1941. The committee’s secretary, William Lockwood, chose to return to the Institute of Pacific Relations and from there join the Office of Strategic Services in China. The chair, Ed Earle, had too many other obligations to continue; they included serving on the “policy making group” for James Phinny Baxter, the Williams College president who had been appointed coordinator of information for a new civilian agency that would become the Office of Strategic Services. Earle’s committee disbanded and the Social Science Research Council directors halted support for international relations for the duration of the war, probably for good reason.⁵⁸

A new factor had thus been added to the list of obstacles that had long frustrated efforts to advance scientific study in a field that, as Lewis Lorwin, a Social Science Research Council consultant, put it, “requires specialized training not only in most of the social sciences, but also in psychology and biology.”⁵⁹ The war had triggered a huge movement of scholars from the university sector into government and the military, including the fifty or so who had joined the Office of the Coordinator of Information research staff. Yale professor Whitney Griswold was the Social Science Research Council committee member most worried about the consequences for teaching and scholarship, to judge from the records of the international relations committee final meetings. What was needed, he said, was not another information-clearinghouse committee or policy-relevant research incubator—there were more of those than ever—but a group that would protect the mission of the university against the competing demands of the defense sector and the “general business and research industries.” When Earle pressed him on making “academic work” in international relations the main priority, Griswold said that there was “a great need for basic research that is germane to the field of international relations. It will be too bad if we, in our interest in the war, allow that to come to a halt.”⁶⁰

Clearly Earle disagreed. He and others instead sought to refashion international relations with their embrace of “European style geopolitics” with the objective of “clarifying the task of statesmen, diplomatists and military planners charged with assuring the survival and future position in the world of the particular state they are serving.” It was a dramatic realignment, as William T. R. Fox, one of the new true believers, described it toward the end of his career in the 1980s.⁶¹

“Bill” Fox was another overworked Temple University instructor who had published on municipal and state government when he accepted a one-year position as instructor and conference director for Princeton’s School of International Affairs in 1941. He judged it to be a “better springboard” to a permanent job. Yale hired him two years later.⁶² Those years also marked his conversion from student of international law to “power politics.” One more “disenchanted realist” is how a laudatory review of his 1944 The Super-Powers, the book that coined the term, put it.⁶³ Fox served as assistant director of Yale’s Institute of International Studies under Frederick Sherwood Dunn. The institute is where many of the founding myths of realism first took shape, starting with its own origin story once its principals realized that theorizing a “Universal Policy” for the United States had been its project all along. Peaceful change was out, and “the rise and fall of hegemonies,” one of its first research projects in its new funding cycle, was in. Its new journal, World Politics, for which Fox served as managing editor, served him and other self-revisers well.

In its second year, 1949, World Politics published Fox’s “Interwar International Relations Research: The American Experience,” the first of his periodic, unabashedly Whiggish accounts of the not-quite-a-discipline. The article includes a brief and dismissive account of the early work of the Social Science Research Council in the field—actually the only account of it until now, although it excludes any mention of the Institute of Pacific Relations. Cramming to fit it into his snapshot of the previous decades’ (and generation’s) obsessions with the “Geneva institutions” and putative indifference to the nitty-gritty of politics across borders, he skewered the international relations committee for asking mostly wrong questions and doing so with little concern for what we might now call methodological rigor. Luckily, Fox and his friends who were also his patrons at Yale—Dunn and Arnold Wolfers—together with Earle at the Institute for Advanced Studies (whom he misidentified as a political scientist) had rediscovered the central issue of “national security” at just the right time, thus increasing “the relevance of international relations research to the making of public policy.”⁶⁴

The critique was probably overdetermined given that the same men were busy reconstituting the Social Science Research Council committee on international relations for a third time, under Dunn’s chairmanship, with the hope that the Yale Institute’s realist approach to policy relevant strategic studies would gain some traction. There were a few obstacles ahead of them, however. The Social Science Research Council had closed down the first postwar international relations committee after only two years. Dunn had failed miserably at balancing commitments and steering a research program. Fox did better as chair of a new committee on civil-military relations in 1952, renamed the Committee on National Security Policy Research four years later.⁶⁵ And Whitney Griswold, the opponent of the turn to security studies on the wartime Social Science Research Council’s International Relations committee, ended the dream that a Yale group would lead the postwar realist revolution when he took over as university president in 1951. Griswold demanded more scholarship through engagement with the established social sciences (since, he said, neither political science nor international relations were real disciplines) and less “mimeographed reports” and “short books” of the kind usually associated with think tanks and government agencies.⁶⁶ Dunn and six others at Yale instead left for Princeton, taking the journal World Politics with them and forming the core of the new Center for International Studies, which the Rockefeller Foundation funded.⁶⁷ Bill Fox moved to Columbia to direct the new Institute for War and Peace Studies there. At MIT, Max Milliken, another onetime key associate of the Institute of International Studies at Yale, kick-started the Center for International Studies, another policy-oriented group, the same year, with the CIA’s financial support.⁶⁸

As we will see, the institutionalization of the area studies model in the 1940s–1960s, with its professional associations and cognate disciplinary specializations, for example in development studies, modernization theory, and the comparative politics of developing areas, surely aided in the forgetting that was necessary for an invented history of international relations to take hold.⁶⁹ The new centers also caused some problems for the empire-building political scientists who were busy seizing exclusive ownership of the international relations brand for their discipline. After the war ended in 1945, U.S. universities resisted more than embraced “national security research.” They did not seriously begin offering courses in it until the 1960s. And area studies mattered more to the foundations than security in the first postwar decades.⁷⁰

Still, there are some problems. Decolonization was arguably the single most significant transformation of the twentieth century, yet it is impossible to name a single scholar among those in the contemporary canon who is known primarily for his or her work on the issue. While arguments about imperialism proliferated across the globe after 1945, they completely disappeared from scholarship in a discipline that ten years earlier considered it to be the fundamental problem of world order.⁷¹ Similarly, more United Nations resolutions dealt with racism than with any other issue, according to Paul Gordon Lauren.⁷² The threat to “Western white prestige” continued to haunt the men in power in Washington and London (and Australia, New Zealand, and South Africa), yet it is impossible to find the issue discussed in the postwar international relations scholarship. As Toni Morrison argued much later about a different part of the academy, “certain absences are so stressed, so ornate, so planned, they call attention to themselves.”⁷³